Wordless Wednesday - Frosted

Songs in a Different Key

Leaves crunching underfoot, frost crystals limning fences, blowsy plumes of grasses rattling like sabres, leaf strewn puddles on the trail—all are plangent leitmotifs in the windy musical work that is late autumn and early winter. The woodland is an Aeolian harp, a vast musical instrument that only the wind can play.

The landscape is settling slowly into the subdued tints of early winter: bronzes, creams, beiges and silvery greys, small splashes of winey red, burgundy, russet, here and there touches of a deep inky blue almost iridescent in its sheen and intensity.

On our morning walks, frost forms sugary drifts on old wood along our path, dusts ferns and outlines fallen leaves almost transparent in their lacy textures. An owl's artfully barred feather lies in thin sunlight under the fragrant cedars down by the spring and seems to be giving off a graceful, pearly light of its own. The weedy residents of forest, field and fen cavort in fringed and tasseled hats.

One needs another lens and tuning for late autumn and early winter, a different sort of vision, songs in a different key. The senses perform a seasonal shift of their own, moving from bright summer happenings toward other motifs and musics in the landscape, things smaller, quieter and more muted. For all their stillness and subdued appearance, the natural elements we encounter in our rambles are complete within themselves, and they are beautiful, even when they are cold and wet and tattered. There are times when one has to look and listen more closely to bear witness to the earth's indwelling grace, and this is one of those times.

There is light in the world, even in Stygian darkness, and I have to remember that. My camera and lens never forget, and out in the woods, they drink in November's silvery light like nectar. I am thankful that they do. They remind me at every turning along on the trail—we are made of star stuff. We live in a sea of light.

Sequestered, Week 239 (CCXXXIX)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.

Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

November Woods

Friday Ramble - Winter

This week's word hails from the Old English winter (plural wintru) meaning "the wet season". At first glance, it seems odd, but winter is usually the wettest season of the year. There are a few contenders for the word's Proto-Indo-European origins, the most popular being the PIE root forms *wend- and *wed- meaning "wet". Other possibilities include the PIE roots *wind- meaning "white", and *gheim-. The latter also means "winter" and forms part of chimera, hibernate, and the mightiest mountain range of them all, the Himalayas.

Whether or not the season involves snow and icy temperatures or just a hatful of rain, most cultures on island earth have a word for it, and it has a singular place in our thoughts, dancing in a stronger light than its other, more moderate kin. Those of us who live in the north tend to predicate our agricultural and culinary activities in spring, summer and autumn on making ready for the long white season.

For the Celts, winter began at Samhain (October 31) and ended on Imbolc (February 1) when springtime arrived. The Winter Solstice on or about December 21 marked the shortest day and longest night of the year, and it was a rowdy celebration of the highest order. From that day onward, the light of the sun would return, a little more every day until the Summer Solstice in June. The legendary King Arthur was believed to have been born on the Winter Solstice, and Druids sometimes refer to the Winter Solstice as Alban Arthuan ("The Light of Arthur").

Rugged northerners that they were, the Norse knew all about winter. They counted their years in winters and thought the world would end after the mightiest winter (the fimbulvetr) of them all. Their beliefs, compiled in the 13th century Icelandic Edda, contain a wealth of oral material from much earlier sources, and the collection is the main source of everything we know about Norse literature, beliefs, customs, deities and creation mythologies. One of these days, I will work my way through the Edda again, and the idea of doing it in winter seems appropriate.

It all comes down to cosmic balance. We owe the lineaments of our existence in the Great Round to a tilt in the earth's axis as it spins merrily in space. When winter reigns here in the north, lands south of the equator are cavorting in summer, and I cling to that thought in the depths of frozen January. Somewhere in the world, it is warm and sunny, and sentient creatures are kicking up their heels in the light.

Winter gifts us with the most brilliantly blue skies of the calendar year by day, and the most spectacular stellar expanses by night. There is nothing to compare with the sun shining through frosted trees on morning walks, with the sound of falling snow in the woods. The darkness is intense on cold nights, and the stars seem so close one can almost reach up and touch them. Stargazy is the word.  Backyard winter astronomy is bone chilling stuff, but I would not miss it for anything in the great wide world.

When winter beckons, I think about moving further south, but it isn't going to happen. Garden catalogues and canisters of wild bird seed take up residence on every surface in the house. I pile up books and music and tea, stir curries, stews and cauldrons of soup, ponder the ranks of pickles and chutneys in my larder.  My boots, skis and snowshoes are trotted out and made ready for treks in the woods. Rambles will be brief this winter (that pesky ice), but I will be taking them for sure, and Beau will be with me every step of the way, clad in one of his natty parkas.

There is clarity and comfort in knowing that long after I am gone, the winter fields and forests of the eastern Ontario highlands will remain, their snows unmarred by the clumsy footprints of this old hen. To know the north woods, one has to wander through them in winter, spend hours tracing the shapes of sleeping trees with eyes and lens, listen to snow falling among them, perhaps become a tree herself.

Thursday Poem - Wage Peace

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,

breathe out whole buildings and flocks of

red wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists

and breathe out sleeping children and

freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out

maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out

lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening: hearing

sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds,

clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words for

thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,

imagine grief

as the outbreath of beauty

or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and

precious:

Have a cup of tea... and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.

Celebrate today.

Judyth Hill

Wordless Wednesday - Upheld

Morning in Bloom

Skies are leaden, and a fine murk wraps the village, rounding shapes and blurring the edges of houses, cars, trees and streets. This is one of those mornings when the village seems to be dancing (or skating) on the edge of the world and the weather and is not quite sure where it belongs. Late autumn, early winter? Where are we?

Adjectives like dark and sunless are evocative, but there are better words for such intervals: bosky, caliginous, cloudy, crepuscular, dark, dim, drab, dusky, gloomy, murky, nebulous, obfuscous, obscure, opaque, overcast, shadowy, somber, stygian, sunless, tenebrous, twilighted, umbral, vague, wintry.

With no light to speak of, this is not a morning for wandering about with camera and peripherals, so far anyway. When Beau and I went out a few minutes ago, an icy wind teased the backs of our necks, and the matter of a longer morning walk was put aside for now. My furry son trotted back into the bedroom and curled up in my warm spot. A single eye peered mournfully at me from behind the patchwork when I entered the room to console him with a tummy rub.

What to do? Upright, but not quite awake, I pull a canister of Chinese flower tea out of the pantry and brew up a pot. As the dried blooms take in liquid and open out, the kitchen is filled with perfume, and home is summery all over again.

Vessel, beaker and contents are almost too arty to drink, and I take image after image, posing them on the kitchen counter, on the old oak table in the dining room, on a wooden platter, a bamboo mat, a brightly coloured napkin. The teapot and cup pose cheerfully, sending up little clouds of fragrant steam and giving breathy sighs now and then. Small wonders amuse small minds on a grey morning in November.

There is a stack of art books to prowl through, and there is a little Mozart on the CD player (Die Zauberflöte). There is a folio of lovely creamy paper and a box of art pens in splendid Mediterranean shades to play with. For dinner this evening, there will be something fragrant and spicy that sings and dances on the tongue. There is room at the table for everyone, and there are enough mugs and cups to go around, mismatched of course. On days like this, one does whatever she can do to light things up. The more kindred spirits around her hearth and table, the better.

In Remembrance

For the brave men in my family who served their country and have gone on ahead: my grandfather, my father, my Uncle Bob, my soulmate, Irv.

They are remembered with so much love.

Sequestered, Week 238 (CCXXXVIII)

Yesterday was cold, and there was frost in the park when we went out for our morning potter through fields and hedgerows and old trees. At nightfall, I carried my few remaining pots of herbs (rosemary, thyme, sage, marjoram and oregano) in from the deck to spend their night indoors and away from killing frosts.

This morning, the temperature is well above zero, and it is is raining gently in the darkness. I have just toted my aromatic tubs out to the deck again, and my doddery knees protest the damp. Now it is time for a general towelling off and a mug of something hot, a slice or two of toasted sourdough which I will have to share.

Beau went outside (grudgingly) and is now curled up in the warm and dry looking morose. Since there is more rain in the cards, we will probably be spending today indoors for the most part, beakers of goodness, something wonderful to read, lighted candles and cooking pots. 

The oscillating weather is perplexing, but at least we are not shoveling snow. 

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

...as dreams are essential to the psyche, so wildness is to life.

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud. More. We are animal not only in body but in spirit. Our minds are the minds of wild animals. Artists, who remember their wildness better than most, are animal artists, lifting their heads to sniff a quick wild scent in the air, and they know it unmistakably, they know the tug of wildness to be followed through your life is buckled by that strange and absolute obedience. ('You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,' wrote Nietzsche.) Children know it as magic and timeless play. Shamans of all sorts and inveterate misbehavers know it; those who cannot trammel themselves into a sensible job and life in the suburbs know it.

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey

After the Rain

Friday Ramble, Nineteen Years and Onward

Last Sunday morning, clocks in the little blue house in the village turned back an hour, and Daylight Saving Time waved goodbye until next year. Its departure marked the end of gardening and gathering, but it also marked nineteen years of blogging here, and I like the fact that the two events are aligned after a fashion.

It seems fitting that the Beech Mother should make an appearance at the top of this morning's post. For years, we (Beau and I) have passed through her alcove on our early morning walks, and we greet her and give her a pat whenever we do. She is beautiful in all seasons but particularly in late autumn and early winter.

For nineteen years, I have been logging on here every morning and posting an image or two. Sometimes I manage a few paragraphs to go along with the visual "stuff", and occasionally I spill my cuppa on the keyboard. I am still astonished that I had the cheek to set this "book of days" up in the first place, let alone do the blogging thing faithfully for nineteen years in a row. Once in a while, I am OK with my efforts, but mostly I am not. When I look at stuff I posted here years ago, I am appalled. Yuck.

However lacking they are (and they are certainly that), these are my morning pages, and chances are they will remain pretty much as they are in the coming year. There may be a bit of font and banner tinkering now and again, but that is all. I don't foresee any significant changes to this place, and I expect blogging life will simply go on as it has been doing so far, photos and scribblings and quotations and bits of poetry.

In late November of 2019, my soulmate passed away after a fierce and "no holds barred" battle with pancreatic cancer, and life without him is still rough going. I can't even begin to express how much I loved the man (and still do), how much I miss his loving, steadfast presence in my life. Several dear friends have also passed away since then, and I miss their presence in my life too.

Most of the time, I feel as though I am just clinging to the wreckage and paddling frantically to stay afloat, but I keep going. I give thanks for my tribe and Beau, for wild kin and trees, for sisters of the heart, good neighbors and friends. I could not have gotten here without all of you.

There are health issues to cope with, but big life stuff notwithstanding, it's good to be here and wrapped up in the toings and froings of what I like to call "the Great Round". Beau and I stay busy, and we go rambling every day and in all weathers. Sometimes, I just tuck the cell phone in my pocket (along with a few of those little green bags), and off we go, our collars turned up against the wind.

We wander along at our own pace, conversing with the great maples and beech mothers, watching leaves dance in the autumn woods, feasting our eyes on the sun going down like a ball of fire over the river, on skies alight with winter stars and moons that seem almost close enough to reach up and touch. My departed love is always with us in spirit, resting easy in a pocket of my tatty old jacket, the one closest to my heart. The man loved rambling, and he was usually the first person out the door.

The road goes ever on, and there is magic everywhere if we have the eyes to see it, the wits to acknowledge it, the grace and humility and plain old human decency to show respect and say thank you. The small adventures of our journeying will continue to make their way here every morning and get spilled out on the computer screen with a bad photo or two and a whole rucksack of wonder. The world is an achingly beautiful place, and I am starting to realize that sometimes an image says everything that needs to be said, all by itself, no words needed from this Old Thing. Mary Oliver said it best:

The years to come – this is a promise –

will grant you ample time

to try the difficult steps in the empire of thought

where you seek for the shining proofs

you think you must have.

But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter,

or more binding, than this deep affinity between

your eyes and the world.

(excerpt from "Terns")

In another poem called "It Was Early", she wrote that sometimes one needs only to stand wherever she is to be blessed, and that is something I keep in mind as Beau and I are tottering along together. Thank you for your kind thoughts and healing energies, your comments and cards and letters, for journeying along with me this year. You are treasured more than you know, and if my fingers were working, I would write each and every one of you. Be well. Be peaceable. Be kind to each other. Be happy.

Thursday Poem - Sometimes I am Startled Out of Myself,

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

Barbara Crooker, from Radiance

Wordless Wednesday - Windy

A Later Shade of Gold

And so it goes... Many trees in the Lanark highlands have already lost their leaves and fallen asleep in their leaf-strewn alcoves, but others are just starting to turn now. Still others hold their turning in abeyance until late in November, and we are always happy to see them on our rambles.

Whole hillsides of birch and lacy tamarack turn gold, and their foliage dazzles the eyes. When I remember their splendor in the depths of winter, the memory will leave me close to tears and hankering for a long trip on foot into the forests north of Lake Superior. No, not this year, perhaps next year...

Butternut trees are always the first to drop their leaves, but the great oaks along the trail retain their bronzey leaves well into winter, and native beeches are still wearing a delightful coppery hue. One of our favorite old maples puts on a magnificent golden performance at this time of the year, and we attend her one woman show with pleasure. While in her clearing, we remember to say thanks for her efforts to brighten a subdued and rather monochromatic interval in the turning of the seasons.

It has been a windy autumn, and we were delighted to discover this week that the north wind has not plucked Maple's leaves and left her standing bare and forlorn on the hill with her sisters. It (the wind, that is) has been doing its best, but the tree is standing fast. I would be "over the moon" if I could photograph or paint something even the smallest scrip as grand and elemental and graceful as Maple is creating in her alcove. Every curve and branch and burnished dancing leaf is a wonder, and the blue sky is a perfect counterpoint.

Writing this, I remembered that as well as being an archaic word for a scrap or fraction of something, scrip also describes a small wallet or pouch carried by medieval pilgrims and seekers. That seems fitting for our journey into the woods and the breathless standing under Maple in all her golden glory. Oh, to belong to the woodland sisterhood of tree and leaf...

Sequestered, Week 237 (CCXXXVII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

You cannot buy the revolution.

You cannot make the revolution.

You can only be the revolution.

It is in your spirit or it is nowhere.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Gone to Seed

Friday Ramble - Edgy

This week's word has been around since the eleventh century, making its way to us through the Middle English egge, Old English ecg, Old French aiglent and Old Germanic ecke, all meaning "corner". It is also related to the Latin acer meaning "sharp", and the Greek akmē meaning "point". At the root of it all is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form ak- meaning "sharp". Kindred words in the English language include acerbic, acid, acrid, acumen, acupuncture, acute, eager, ester, exacerbate, hammer and selvedge as well as eglantine (sweetbriar), an old world rose known for its thorns.

An edgy time is this, for the old Celtic year has passed away, and we stand on the threshold of a brand new year, in the north a chilling contraption of fallen leaves and freezing earth, short days, darkness, frost and wind. This year, the weather is unseasonably warm, and many of the village children did their trick or treating last night in short sleeves (or no sleeves at all), but we were not fooled. Colder times are not far off. The short days and long nights are here to remind us.

The eastern Ontario highlands seem empty at this time of the year and rather lonesome. Except for Canada geese and a few intrepid herons, migratory birds have departed for warmer climes, and the lake seems still and empty. Most of our wild forest kin are already hibernating or are thinking about doing it.

On early morning walks, the long shadows falling across our trail have edges as sharp as the finest examples of the blade smith's craft. The earth beneath our boots is firm, leaves are crunchy, and some mornings, the puddles along our way are rimed with ice. For all the emptiness, morning sunlight changes the landscape into something rich and elegant and inviting: milkweed sculpted into pleasing shapes, bare trees twinkling like stars, the margins of blackberry leaves rosy and sparkling with frost or wetness. The air is fragrant with cedar, spruce and pine.

These weeks always seem chthonic to me. That engaging word with its bewildering arrangement of vowels and consonants springs from the Greek khthonios, meaning "of the earth", and it is usually employed in describing subterranean matters and deities of the underworld. In using the adjective, we focus on what is deeper or within, rather than on what is apparent at first glance or resting on the surface. Implicit in the expression are notions of rest, sleep, fertility and rebirth - entelechy, mortality and abundance coexisting and enfolding each other in a deep embrace.

Beau and I will celebrate this hallowed day with long walks, leaf blowing and gardening, with cups of Darjeeling and spicy munchies. We will plant garlic this afternoon as we always do on the first day of November. The weather is warm, so we (or rather I) will be in short sleeves. Happy Samhain, happy November! 

Happy Samhain (Halloween)

Thursday Poem - All Hallows Eve

Night of the void between the worlds,
night when the veil between the worlds is
stirring, lifting, when the old year shrivels and
fades, and the new year has not yet begun,

when light takes the form of darkness,
when the last light sinks into darkness
like spilled water, disappears in the leaves,
in the hot secret runs of earth underneath.

when grandmothers rise like mist, the silent
grandmothers with soft tongues of fog
in the ear, claiming nothing for themselves,
or complaining that they were abandoned,

when children go out clothed in darkness,
the children with sweet orange lips slip among
whispers, go out with wavering candles
among crosses and mossy eyes in stone,

when children go out in the mist, the
children tasting of candy, of carelessly
spilled dreams, the children like faraway
stars flaming into the soft folds of darkness.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio), from Doors to the Universe

Wordless Wednesday - Frosted

Along the Reeded Shore

Sequestered, Week 236 (CCXXXVI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Oh, how can I say this: People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.

 Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder

A Bin Full of Crows

Friday Ramble Before Samhain (Halloween)

Here we are again, nearing my favorite festive observance in the whole turning year. Next Thursday is the eve of Samhain, or in popular parlance, Halloween.

On morning walks, there's a chill in the air that cannot be ignored. Daylight arrives later with every passing day, and dusk makes an earlier appearance, village street lamps turning themselves on one by one, hours before they used to. The shorter days and longer nights are all too apparent to a crone's fierce and gimlet eye, at least to this crone's eye. How did we get here so swiftly?

The last days of October have a fleeting beauty all their own. In the great wide world, crops and fruit have been gathered in and stored, farm animals tucked into barns, stables and coops readied for the long white season. Rail fences wear frost crystals, and nearby field grasses crunch pleasingly underfoot. Native wild things are frantically topping up their winter larders and preparing warm burrows for winter.

The trees have already withdrawn into themselves for the long white season. Showers of red and gold leaves are falling, but the great oaks on my favorite hill are reluctant to part with their finery, and they are hanging on to every leaf. A north wind scours the wooded slopes and sweeps fallen fragments into rustling drifts and heaps. The air is spicy and carries the promise of deep cold days to come.

The coming festival (cross quarter day) marks “summer's end', the beginning of the dark half of the year. According to the old Celtic two-fold division of the year, summer was the interval between Beltane and Samhain, and winter the interval from Samhain to Beltane. It was also the gate between one year and another. For the ancestors, the old year ended at sunset on October 31, and a new year danced into being.

Some of us are enchanted by seasonal turnings in the Great Round and the old ways. Some of us love spooky "stuff", the fey, the mysterious and the unknown. Some like Halloween "clobber" and dressing up. Others are fascinated by the myriad ways in which the human species has measured the passage of time over the centuries.

The festival doings of the ancients celebrated pivotal cosmic points in their year, and Samhain was sacred to them. It was a fey interval in which the natural order dissolved back into primordial chaos for a brief unruly fling before regenerating, burnished and newly ordered for another journey through the seasons. They believed the veil between the living and the dead was thin on Samhain night, and that one's beloved dead could return for a visit. All the old festivals celebrate the cyclical nature of existence, but October 31st does so more than any other. 

Many dear ones have departed this plane of existence in recent years. While they were here, they walked through the world loving it fiercely, and they treasured its innate abundance and wildness, its grandeur, grace and reciprocity. Lit from within, they blazed with life and passion wherever they went, and they lighted up every room they entered—the rooms were always a little darker when they left. Somewhere beyond the here and the now, my departed loved ones are still alight, and I remember them. An altar is created for them at Samhain, and it becomes more crowded with every passing year. Places will be set for all at the old oak table on Thursday night.

Three cheers for trick-or-treating, tiny guisers and goblins on the threshold. What's not to love about witches, ghosts and goblins, grinning jack-o-lanterns, the colors orange and black? As I dole out treats to wee neighborhood friends next Thursday evening, I will reflect on the old year and tuck it thankfully away under a blanket of fallen maple leaves. I will think good thoughts about the cycle that is coming into being. I will remember that endings and beginnings are natural and ordained parts of earthly existence, not something to be feared.

Bright blessings to you and your clan. May your jack-o-lanterns glow brightly next week, and throngs of tiny costumed guests attend your threshold. May your home be a place of warmth and light, and your hearth a haven from things that go bump in the night. May there be laughter and merriment at your door, music and fellowship in abundance. May all good things come to you and your clan.

Thursday Poem - Fall

Are the leaves embarrassed by this sudden change
from serviceable green to gaudy red and gold?
All those colors clanging in the wind: copper,
bronze, brass. And when they all fall down
will the empty branches miss them? Or are they
comforted by the feathery touch of birds,
their pale claws and tiny beaks? In the meadow,
the goldenrod is waving goodbye, nodding
above the bracken, the pearly everlasting.
The corn’s already been taken; only stalks
and stubble remain. This is the season
of diminishing returns. And what will we do
with that hour we gain when the clocks turn
back? Will it rattle in our pocket, empty
as the moon? 

Barbara Crooker